Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage (3 April 1964-) was the UKIP and Brexit Party MEP for South East England from 10 June 1999. He was a founding member of UKIP, a far-right party which advocated for a British exit from the European Union, serving as the Leader of UKIP from 2006 to 2009 (succeeding Roger Knapman and preceding Malcom Pearson, Baron Pearson of Rannoch), from 2010 to 2016 (succeeding Jeffrey Titford and preceding Diane James), and in 2016 (succeeding James and preceding Paul Nuttall). In 2019, he took part in the founding of the Brexit Party due to UKIP's adoption of xenophobia as one of its core tenets.

Biography
Nigel Farage was born in Downe, Kent, England in 1964, and he worked as a commodities trader in London in 1982. He joined the Conservative Party in 1978, but supported the UK Green Party in 1989 due to its support for Euroscepticism; dismayed by the Conservative leader and Prime Minister John Major's signing of the Maastricht Treaty and the ensuing entry of the United Kingdom into the European Union, Farage was one of the founding members of the UK Independence Party, a right-wing populist and strongly Eurosceptic party. In 1999, after a failed attempt at running for Parliament and the European Parliament, he was elected the UKIP MEP for South East England. In 2006, he became the leader of UKIP, and, in 2009, UKIP won the second-highest share of Britain's European Parliament seats, beating the Labour Party and Lib Dems with over 2 million votes. In 2009, he stepped down as UKIP leader in order to run for Parliament, challenging the Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow in Buckingham, but coming in third. In 2010, he returned to leading UKIP, but he attempted to resign after failing to win the South Thanet seat in Kent during the 2016 general election, although his resignation was rejected. In June 2016, he successfully campaigned for Brexit, and he resigned after its success. He briefly continued to serve as acting UKIP leader from October to November 2016, with Paul Nuttall being elected as his successor in a leadership election. In 2017, he became a Fox News contributor, and he resigned from UKIP in 2018 after the fascist paramilitary leader Tommy Robinson became an advisor to the new UKIP leader Gerard Batten. On 13 February 2019, he switched his affiliation to the new Brexit Party, which soon came to be a refuge for former UKIP members opposed to the party's shift further to the right.